UK Police Seize $1.4M in Bitcoin Traced to Shuttered Darknet Markets

Over a million dollars worth of Bitcoin that moved through darknet marketplaces nearly a decade ago has been forfeited to a regional English police force.

Avon and Somerset Police said Thursday its financial investigation unit had recovered 20.21 BTC, further cryptoassets and money held in a bank account, worth $1.4 million (£1,032,487.86) combined. The person under investigation had a previous money laundering conviction and has since died.

Officers traced the holdings, with help from the force’s cyber team, to darknet markets running from 2016 to 2019. The force said those sites, all since shut down, had facilitated crimes from drug supply to people trafficking. It did not name them.

A well-documented era

That window covers the most heavily policed period in darknet history. AlphaBay, then the largest such market anywhere, was seized in July 2017, while Dutch police had already taken over Hansa and ran it covertly for a month, harvesting the details of users fleeing AlphaBay before shutting it the same day. Dream Market, which absorbed much of the remaining traffic, announced its own closure in March 2019 and went dark at the end of April.

Every transaction those markets processed remains visible. “Many people think cryptocurrencies… place assets beyond the reach of law enforcement,” said Detective Constable Anthony Davis of the force’s financial investigation unit, pointing to the permanent record on the blockchain as “an invaluable source of evidence.”

The seizure is the largest the force has recorded since crypto wallet freezing orders became available in April 2024. Those powers let officers freeze and seize crypto without making an arrest first, move it into wallets controlled by law enforcement, and confiscate written passwords or storage devices. Police can also destroy an asset outright if required, and the government singled out privacy coins as “not conducive to the public good” when the rules came in.

The assets were forfeited earlier this year under the Proceeds of Crime Act, after a court accepted they represented the proceeds of unlawful conduct. Money recovered under the act is directed into community and policing programs.

At current prices, the Bitcoin alone would be worth around $1.6 million. The force did not say when its valuation was struck.